7 February 2004 Hong Kong City Hall Theatre; a performance organized by ROI Productions; the other performers were qin players Wu Wenguang from Beijing, Tse Chun-yan from Hong Kong, and Hida Tatsushi from Japan, plus the komungo six string zither player Cheong Dae-seog from Korea. (Originally scheduled for April 2003 but postponed due to the SARS epidemic; see poster [174 KB])

7 September 2002, at the City Hall Theatre in Hong Kong, the Qin Recital of the Three Styles. My style was "reconstructed melodies using silk strings"; the other players were Tong Kin-woon (his personal style) and Jiang Kangsheng (a student in the 1950s of Pu Xuezhai and other famous qin masters).

1.Performance VenuesThe ideal place to listen to guqin is in the quiet of someone's home, surrounding by appropriate objects; everything else is a compromise. In this regard there is often a tendency to place a guqin performance in what seems like an appropriate visual location; unfortunately the noise in such places often requires listeners to close their ears and try to imagine the actual sound of the music. With guqin it is much better to close the eyes and open the ears rather than vice versa. It should also be emphasized that if the aim is to re-create the sound appreciated by the literati who gave birth to and nurtured the tradition, then there is no alternative to using
silk strings.

For guqin one might also add that the most authentic situation would be to have attendees participate by playing themselves, doing calligraphy, painting, or engaging in another such activity (see
"Four Arts" and
"18 Scholars"). Here one might use multi-media methods to re-create such an environment.

For conventional public guqin performance, two aspects of presentation require particular attention.

The essential beauty of the traditional guqin (i.e., one with silk strings) lies in the rich but delicate overtones produced by plucking or hitting the strings (the nylon metal strings so introduced during and commonly used since the Cultural Revolution have their own advantages, particularly in performances, but they do not have this subtle coloring, hence they lead to different styles of play). To capture this the most essential elements are microphones with low internal noise and a large frequency range, and a high quality microphone pre-amp. Under General and Technical Details of my Qin Recordings I discuss issues involved in recording qin. For amplification the issues are much the same except that close miking is probably required. However, a major problem in amplifying qin in this way is often an over-emphasis on the sound of the fingers sliding on the strings. Avoiding this requires considerable skill on the part of the technicians, as well as the right equipment.

For contact microphones in my experience the sound has never been good: the true sound of the qin never never comes through and even inside the guqin the contact microphone still may be picking up too much sound from the other instrument(s).

Piezo pickups completely cut out sound from nearby instruments, but their clean sound leave little of the original guqin sound color.

The above comments concern mainly silk string guqin performed solo. With the modern nylon metal string qin the sound no longer has the traditional qin color, so amplification does not have to take this into consideration. And when played with other instruments the colors of even the silk string guqin tend to be hidden (though at least in recording this example may suggest otherwise). In such cases I am intrigued by the possibility of hooking up a guqin amflified with a piezo pickup to some sort of sound processor. As yet I have no experience with this, but guqin offers intriguing possibilities with such a setup, either alone or in combination with other instruments.
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